'Just Call Me Angel of the Morning': a marketing services unit

"A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service." —Henry David Thoreau

The more I learn about the direct marketing industry, the harder it is to keep track of who's who and who does what. Although my knowledge of the business continues to expand and the list of interesting and impressive people I meet grows each day, the names of companies, the services they offer and the logos they use to promote their names and services continue to change.

This comes to mind because on Aug. 1 I spoke with Mark Yesayian, who recently joined SolutionSet, a digital, data, direct and local marketing services company, as president of its (wait for it) newly launched division: the relationship marketing group. Yesayian said the group will allow SolutionSet to bring together its direct mail and catalog capabilities with “deepening capabilities in analytics, CRM, automation and account planning as well.”

But he also said he thinks the unit was “mislabeled as a direct unit” and that it has “always done more than [just] direct marketing.”

Mislabeling and relabeling to reflect a larger variety of services has been a popular theme lately. In the eight months I've been with Direct Marketing News, I've covered the following company rebrandings:

Thomson Reuters launched a rebranding campaign designed by Ogilvy Worldwide to inform consumers about each of the company's diverse businesses.

Reed Business merged Mardev and DM2-DecisionMaker in March of 2010, rebranding itself as Mardev-DM2. In May 2011, the company dropped the hyphen to become Mardevdm2. (It later launched a b-to-b marketing campaign to promote its transition from a traditional list services company to a service provider offering a wider range of services. More on that subject later.)

Carlson Marketing Group is in the process of completing a rebranding effort that will result in a new name, logo, “atmosphere and persona,” said Barry Wegener, senior director of marketing and communications.

MeritDirect rebranded its list management and interactive services division as the “data and media services” unit.

During the same time, the following companies have launched new divisions:

Infogroup launched a client experience group to coordinate and manage client interactions across the data management and digital services organization.

McCann Worldgroup opened a New York-based practice to integrate performance analytics and marketing intelligence into its services.

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